Actively “Feeling Your Way” Towards Knowing

If there is no such map, then what is wayfinding? Instead of what he calls a “complex-structure metaphor” (the mental map), Ingold proposes a “complex-process metaphor” which he calls wayfinding. On page 220, he writes: “With a complex-process metaphor, little or no pre-structured content is imputed to the mind. Instead, wayfinding is understood as a skilled performance in which travelers, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, ‘feel their way’ towards their goal, continually adjusting their movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of their surroundings.”

In this model, “we know as we go, from place to place” (229). “People’s knowledge of the environment undergoes continuous formation in the very course of their moving about in it” (230). This is not knowledge stored and then applied—it’s knowledge emerging through practice, through movement, through ongoing engagement with dynamic environments. This extends the dwelling perspective: we don’t design then act, we act and knowledge emerges from that immersion.

Wayfinding is more like storytelling, artistic performance, or musical improvisation. Just as a musical score isn’t the music itself—the music only exists in the actual performance—a map isn’t the same as the journey. The doing is what matters. And just as you can’t understand music by analyzing the score alone, you can’t understand wayfinding by studying mental representations. There is no such map to study because the process itself is what generates knowing.